While the whole Trump-Russia collusion thing was always absurd in my view, Russia did intervene in our 2016 election to sow chaos. That Democrats and the media were the major players in creating that chaos over the last three years does not lessen what Putin did. That's just what Russia and the Soviets before them do. Democrats just noticed in 2016 and it shocked them.
As Glenn Reynolds noted in his debate review, Putin was the biggest loser in the debate:
I don’t think this many Democrats have stood on a stage and promised to stand against Russian infiltration in my lifetime. Seriously, it’s a huge pivot from when Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 for calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe.
The debate publicly locked in what I noted in amazement in 2016:
Democrats have clearly all gotten the memo to ignore answering anything substantive about the damning information found in the Wikileaks releases by attacking the now-evil Russians as the source of the information and questioning the patriotism of anybody who isn't outraged about that origin alone.
Which is kind of funny coming from the party that only four short years ago mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for saying the Russians are our number one geopolitical foe.
... That ill-informed mockery that the Left embraced at least fit well with the late Cold War Democratic tendency to see the evil Soviet Union as morally equivalent to free America. Republicans say the Russians are our enemies? Oh no, our flaws are so much more worse, the Democrats said. America is unworthy of opposing them, they argued.
But now, in response to Russian hacking of Democratic emails, these Democrats are suddenly hard-line Code Warriors ready to go toe to toe with the Russkies in cyber-space to protect their precious bodily emails.
To be fair to the Democrats, it has to be unfamiliar territory to have Russians trying to undermine Democrats rather than undermining Republicans, as the Soviet Russians regularly did during the Cold War with their propaganda efforts that our Left ate up like organic kale.
So Democrats who once excused or explained or downplayed anything the Soviets did abroad or at home now despise the Russians with white-hot fury.
Do you doubt me when I note that the Fuck-Up Fairy lives in Russia?
And once again I will ask, what will happen when the Russian people notice that Putin has effed up royally?
Russia has alienated the West which was not a military threat to Russia by pointless threats to the West given weight by Russian invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, even though the West was willing to help Russia upgrade their defense industry until 2014; while China stole and then surpassed Russian military technology and production methods.
And recall that China has dormant claims on Russian Far Eastern territory with a treaty keeping those claims dormant up for cancellation in 2021.
Putin isn't brilliant. He is weakening Russia's economy, failing to arrest the decline of Russia's defense industries, alienating potential allies, and strengthening potential enemies all for the "glory" of Abhkazia, South Ossetia, Crimea, parts of the Donbas, and bases in Assad's Syria.
And he's not that impressive riding a horse bare-chested, truth be told.
Chimps with nukes.
What Western plot could be as effective at wrecking Russia than Putin himself? Seriously, why isn't there a conspiracy theory floating around Russia on that possibility?
Seriously, Putin has rallied the most left-wing Democrats to the idea that Russia is the enemy. The Left denies anyone but Republicans are enemies. For Christ's sake, people, those lefty nutballs looked at 9/11 and asked "why do they hate us?" as if we did something to deserve three thousand dead at the hands of jihadis!
President Obama made his famous Cairo outreach speech to the Moslem world on the theory that by telling the Islamic world that he was president that he would basically disarm their hate.
And President Obama sent Secretary of State Clinton to Moscow with the amazingly mistranslated "reset" button in the wake of the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008.
Yet now the Democrats claim that talking to a random Russian is treason.
Really, bravo Putin. Well done.
